The Egyptian Conception of Immortality eBook

In the Middle Empire, which is the period under discussion,
the process of mummification had reached a middle
stage, and, while we are unable to explain exactly
the causal relationship, it is clear that this advance
in the treatment of the body accompanied a spread
of the belief in the Osirian immortality.

VII. THE NEW EMPIRE

The New Empire (1600-1200 B.C.) was the great period
of foreign conquest. The Hyksos, Asiatic invaders,
had held Egypt for a century or more. The Theban
princes who drove them out became kings of Egypt,
and followed them into Asia. With an army trained
in war by the long struggle with the Hyksos, the Egyptian
kings, having tasted the sweetness of the spoils of
war, entered on the conquest of western Asia and the
Sudan. The plunder of both these regions poured
into Egypt. Under Thothmes III an annual campaign
was conducted into Syria to bring back the spoils and
the tribute. Foreign slaves and the products
of foreign handicraft were for sale in every market-place.
The treasury was filled to overflowing. A large
share was assigned to Amon, the god of the Theban
family. Temples were built for him; estates established
for the maintenance of his rites; thousands of priests
enrolled for the service of his properties.
The god became, in a material sense, the greatest
god of Egypt, the national god; and his priesthood
became the most powerful organization in the kingdom.
The high priest of Amon usurped the power of the king
and finally supplanted him. Such was the period
in which the next great development of the Egyptian
idea of immortality is to be noted—­ a period
of priestly activity in the beginning and of priestly
domination in the end.

The priests are the scribes, the men of learning.
They have the lore of all magic, medicine, rules
of conduct, religious rites. It is not mere chance,
therefore, that the New Empire was marked by a great
increase of magic in all its forms—­texts
and symbolic objects—­and by a great development
in the knowledge of the other world. In some
of the texts the geography of the underworld, in which
Osiris is king, is worked out in great detail.
When the sun sets in the west, Ra in his boat enters
the underworld and passes through it during the twelve
hours of the night, bringing light and happiness to
those who are in the underworld. In the effort
to secure the tomb against plundering, the royal graves
had been cut in the solid rock,—­long and
complicated passages with false leads and deceptive
turns and the burial chamber in an unexpected place.
The long walls of these rooms presented a great surface
suitable to decoration, and they were utilized to
depict scenes from the underworld and the passage
of Ra through it, so that the tombs became in fact
representations of the land of the dead, and were so
considered. These royal tombs were at a distance
from the cultivated land, hidden in valleys in the
desert. Their funerary temples were built on
the edge of the desert beside the temples of the gods
of the place.